Autonomous citation indexing and literature browsing using citation context

ABSTRACT

An autonomous citation indexing system which can be used as an assistant agent automates and enhances the task of finding publications in electronic form, including publications located on the world wide web. The system parses citations from papers and identifies citations to the same paper that may differ in syntax. The system also extracts and provides the context of citations to a given paper, allowing a researcher to determine what is published in other papers about a given paper. Common citations and word or string vector distance similarity are used to find related articles in a search.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/082,071, filed May 20, 1998 now U.S. Pat. No. 6,289,342, which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/070,489, filed Jan. 5, 1998.

FIELD OF INVENTION

The present invention relates to autonomous citation indexing. Specifically, an autonomous citation indexing system is completely automatic, autonomously extracts citations, identifies identical citations which occur in different formats, and identifies the context of citations in the body of the articles.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

A citation index indexes citations contained in articles, linking the articles with the cited works. Citation indexing was originally designed for information retrieval. A citation index allows navigation backward in time by following the list of cited articles and forward in time by tracking which subsequent articles cite any given article.

The rate of production of scientific literature continues to increase, making it time consuming for researchers to stay current. Most published scientific research appears in paper documents such as scholarly journals or conference proceedings. There is a considerable time delay between the completion of research and the availability of the publication. Thus, the World Wide Web (“the web”) has become an important distribution medium for scientific research. An increasing number of authors are making new research available on the web in the form of preprints or technical reports which can be downloaded and printed. These web publications are often available before any corresponding printed publication in journals or conference proceedings. In order to keep current on research, especially in rapidly advancing fields, a researcher can search the web to download papers as soon as they are written. Literature available on the web is easier to access. The web, however, does have its own limitations for searching. The web lacks a standardized organization, publications themselves tend to be poorly organized (each institution or researcher may have its, his or her own organizational scheme), and publications are often spread throughout the web. A researcher could spend large amounts of time solely for searching, downloading and printing papers to read in order to find those publications that may be important. However, web based literature can be read and processed by autonomous agents far more easily than printed documents. Agents can search the web and thereby provide an automated means to find, download and judge the relevance of web publications. The present invention concerns just such an agent. An assistant agent is a computer program which automatically performs some task on behalf of a user.

One method for finding relevant and important publications on the web is to use a combination of Web Search Engines and manual web browsing. Web search engines such as AltaVista (http://altavista.digital.com) index the text contained on web pages, allowing users to find information with keyword search. Some research publications on the web are made available in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) format, making the text of these papers searchable with web search engines. However, most of the published research papers on the web are in Postscript form (which preserves the formatting of the original), rather than HTML. The text of these papers is not indexed by search engines such as AltaVista, requiring researchers to locate pages which contain links to these papers, e.g. by searching for a paper by title or author name. Another limitation of the web search engines is that they typically only use word frequency information to find relevant web pages, although other types of information are potentially useful, e.g. papers which contain citations of common earlier papers may be related.

In the following text, reference will be made to several publications in the open literature. These publications are herein incorporated by reference.

The present invention benefits from three areas of prior work. The first involving citation indexing which indexes the citations made between academic articles. See, for example, in Chapters 1 to 3 and Chapter 10 of the book by E. Garfield, entitled “Citation Indexing: Its Theory and Application in Science, Technology and Humanities”, ISI Press, Philadelphia, 1979.

The second concerning semantic distance measures between text documents. Research in this area is directed towards finding quantifiable and useful measures of similarity or relatedness between bodies of text.

The third, web, interface and assistant software agents. Several papers have addressed the problem of locating “interesting” web pages. For example, articles including those by M. Pazzani, J. Muramatsu and D. Billsus, entitled “Syskill & Webert: Identifying interesting web sites” in Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI96), 1996; by F. Menczer, entitled “Arachnid: Adaptive retrieval agents choosing heuristic neighborhoods for information discovery” in Machine Learning: Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference, pp. 227-235, 1997; by M. Balabanovic, entitled “An adaptive web page recommendation service” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, ACM Press, New York, pp. 378-385, 1997; and by A. Moukas, entitled “Amalthaea: Information discovery and filtering using a multiagent evolving ecosystem” in Proceedings of the Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multiagent Technology, 1996. This includes work which uses learning techniques based on user feedback.

In citation indexing, references contained in articles are used to give credit to previous work in the literature and provide a link between the “citing” and “cited” articles. A citation index, such as Garfield, supra, indexes the citations that an article makes, linking the articles with the cited works. Citation indexes were originally designed mainly for information retrieval, as referenced by E. Garfield in an article entitled “The concept of citation indexing: A unique and innovative tool for navigating the research literature” Current Contents, Jan. 3, 1994. The citation links allow navigating the literature in unique ways. Papers can be located independent of language and words in the title, keywords or document. A citation index allows navigation backward in time (the list of cited articles) and forward in time (subsequent articles which cite the current article). Citation indexing can be a powerful tool for literature search, in particular:

a. A citation index allows finding out where and how often a particular article is cited in the literature, thus providing an indication of the importance of the article. Older articles may define methodology or set the research agenda. Newer articles may respond to or build upon the original article.

b. Citations can help to find other publications which may be of interest. Using citation information in addition to keyword information should allow the identification of more relevant literature.

c. The context of citations in citing publications may be helpful in judging the important contributions of a cited paper.

d. A citation index can provide detailed analyses of research trends and identify emerging areas of science.

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)® (Institute for Scientific Information, 1997) produces multi-disciplinary citation indexes, which are used to provide several commercial services for searching scientific periodicals. An ISI service is the Keywords Plus® service, which adds citation information to the indexing of an article. Specifically, in addition to the title, author-supplied keywords, and abstract, Keywords Plus adds additional indexing terms which are derived from the titles of cited papers. As a user browses through papers in the ISI databases, bibliographic coupling allows navigation by locating papers which share one or more references.

Another commercial citation index is the legal database offered by the West Group (KeyCite). This database indexes case law as opposed to scientific research articles.

Compared to the current commercial citation indexes, the citation indexing performed by using the present invention has the following limitations: it does not cover the significant journals as comprehensively and it cannot distinguish subfields as accurately, e.g. it will not disambiguate two authors with the same name.

The present invention, Autonomous Citation Indexing (ACI), has significant advantages over traditional citation indexing:

a) No manual effort is required for indexing, resulting in a corresponding reduction in cost and increase in availability. We believe that this can be very important.

b) ACI facilitates literature search based on the context of citations—given a particular paper of interest, an ACI system can display the context of how the paper is cited in subsequent publications. The context of citations can be very important for both literature search and evaluation.

Because ACI does not require human indexers, very significant further benefits result:

a) ACI allows creating more up-to-date databases which can avoid lengthy journal publication delays, because it is not necessary to limit the amount of literature indexed due to human resource requirements. In many areas preprints and conference papers are available long before any corresponding journal publication.

b) The potential for broader coverage of the literature as opposed to indexing only a select set of journals. SCI has been repeatedly criticized for not indexing certain literature.

ACI can improve scientific communication, and facilitates an increased rate of scientific dissemination and feedback.

R. D. Cameron in an article entitled “A universal citation database as a catalyst for reform in scholarly communication”, Technical Report CMPT TR 95-07, School of Computering Science, Simon Fraser University (1995), has proposed a “universal [Internet-based] bibliographic and citation database linking every scholarly work ever written”. He describes a system in which all published research would be available to and searchable by any scholar with Internet access. Also, citation links between those documents would be recorded and available as search criteria. Such a database would be highly “comprehensive and up-to-date”, making it a powerful tool for academic literature research, and for the production of statistics as with traditional citation indexes.

One important difference between Cameron's vision of a universal citation database and the present invention is that the present invention does not require any extra effort on the part of authors beyond placement of their work on the web. The present invention automatically creates the citation database from downloaded documents whereas Cameron has proposed a system whereby authors or institutions must provide citation information in a specific format.

Another area of prior work is the use of semantic distance measures given a set of documents (essentially text strings), there has been much interest in distance (or the inverse, similarity) measurements between documents. Most of the known distance measures between bodies of text rely on models of similarity of groups of letters in the text. One type of text distance measure is the string distance or edit distance which considers distance as the amount of difference between strings of symbols. For example, the Levenshtein distance, as described in an article entitled “Binary codes capable of correcting spurious insertions and deletions of ones (original in Russian)”, Russian Problemy Peredachi Informatsii 1, 12-25 (1965), is a well known early edit distance where the difference between two text strings is simply the number of insertions, deletions, or substitutions of letters required to transform one string into another. A more recent and sophisticated example is an algorithm called LikeIt as described by P. N. Yianilos in Technical Report No. 97-093, NEC Research Institute, entitled “The LikeIt intelligent string comparison facility” (1997) and by P. N. Yianilos, in an article entitled “Data structures and algorithms for nearest neighbor search in general metric spaces”, in Proceedings of the 4^(th) ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pp. 311-321 (1993) and in U.S. Pat. No. 5,978,797 to Yianilos and assigned to the same assignee as the present invention, where a string distance is based on an algorithm that tries to “build an optimal weight matching of the letters and multigraphs (groups of letters)”.

Another type of text string distance is based on statistics of words which are common to sets of documents, especially as part of a corpus of a large number of documents. One commonly used form of this measure, based on word frequencies, is known as term frequency times inverse document frequency (TFIDF) as described by G. Salton and C. Yang, in an article entitled “On the specification of term values in automatic indexing”, in the Journal of Documentation 29, pp 351-372 (1973). Consider a dictionary of all of the words (terms) in a corpus of documents. In some systems, very common words, sometimes called stop words, such as the, a, and so forth are ignored. Also, sometimes only the stems of words are considered instead of complete words. An often used stemming heuristic introduced by M. F. Porter, in an article entitled “An algorithm for suffix stripping”, Program 14, pp 130-137 (1980), tries to return the same stem from several forms of the same word, e.g. “walking”, “walk”, “walked”, all become simply walk. In a document d, the frequency of each word stem s is f_(ds) and the number of documents having stem s is n_(s). In document d the highest term frequency is called f_(d) _(max) . In one such TFIDF scheme, as described in an article by G. Salton and C. Buckley, entitled “Term weighting approaches in automatic text retrieval”, in Technical Report 87-881, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University (1987), a word weight w_(ds) is calculated as: $\begin{matrix} {w_{ds} = \frac{\left( {0.5 + {0.5\frac{f_{ds}}{f_{d_{\max}}}}} \right)\left( {\log \frac{n_{D}}{n_{s}}} \right)}{\sqrt{\sum\limits_{{j\varepsilon}\quad d}\left( {\left( {0.5 + {0.5\frac{f_{dj}}{f_{d_{\max}}}}} \right)^{2}\left( {\log \frac{N_{D}}{n_{j}}} \right)^{2}} \right)}}} & (1) \end{matrix}$

where N_(D) is the total number of documents. In order to find the distance between two documents, a dot product of the two word vectors for those documents is calculated.

A third type of semantic distance measure is one in which knowledge about document components or structure is used. In the case of research publications for example, citations of papers by other papers has been used to create citation indexes (as described above) which can be used to gauge document relatedness as described by G. Salton, in an article entitled “Automatic indexing using bibliographic citations”, Journal of Documentation 27, pp 98-110 (1971).

The third area of prior work is assistant agents. The present invention can be viewed as an assistant agent. Assistant agents are agents designed to assist the user with the use of software systems. These agents may perform tasks on behalf of the user, making interaction with the software system easier and/or more efficient. Many web based assistant agents have been constructed to help the user find interesting and relevant World Wide Web pages more quickly and easily. Many of them such as Moukas, supra; Balabanovic, supra; Menczer, supra; Pazzani et al, supra and those described in an overview of several agents in an article by P. Edwards et al., “Exploiting learning technologies for World Wide Web agents”, in IEE Colloquium on Intelligent World Wide Web Agents, Digest No.: 97/118 (1997), learn from user feedback in an environment of word vector features to find more relevant web pages. Interesting changes to known relevant web pages are learned by the “Do-I-Care” agent as described by B. Starr et al, in an article entitled “Do-I-Care: Tell me what's changed on the web”, in Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Machine Learning in Information Access Technical Papers (1996). This system also allows the agent to learn from the feedback of another user. Although it does no learning, the heuristic web agent “CiFi” as described in an article by S. Loke et al, entitled “CiFi: An intelligent agent for citation finding on the World-Wide Web”, in Technical Report 96/4, Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne (1996), tries to find citations to a specified paper on the World Wide Web.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

An Autonomous Citation Index autonomously creates a citation index from literature in electronic format [printed literature can be converted to electronic form using optical character recognition (OCR)]. An ACI system autonomously locates new articles, extract citations, identifies citations to the same article which occur in different formats, and identifies the context of citations in the body of articles. The viability of autonomous citation indexing depends on the ability to perform these functions accurately.

The ability to recognize variant forms of citations to the same publication is critical to the usefulness of ACI. Without this ability, it would not be possible to group multiple citations to the same publication (e.g. list the context of all citations to a given publication), nor would it be possible to generate statistics on citation frequency (allowing estimation of the importance of articles).

Finding articles can be accomplished by searching the World Wide Web, monitoring mailing lists or newsgroups for announcements of new articles, or by direct links with publishers. Once familiar with ACI systems, researchers may send notification of new papers directly, allowing these papers to be indexed almost immediately. Journal papers are increasingly being made available online at journal web sites. Journals typically charge for access to online papers, and as such one way to index these papers would be to make agreements with the publishers. An ACI system is likely to be beneficial to publishers, because users can be directed to the journal's home page, increasing subscriptions. Pay-per-view agreements may be beneficial for users that do not wish to subscribe to the journals in order to view a single article.

Finding and extracting citations and the context of citations, from articles in electronic form, is relatively simple. For example, the citations are often contained in a list at the end of the article, the list of citations is typically formatted such that citation identifiers, vertical spacing, or indentation can be used to delineate individual citations, and the context of citations is typically marked in a consistent format, e.g. using identifiers such as, ^(“3”), “[7]”, “[Minsky 92]”, or “Williams (1991)”. By using a number of rules to account for common variations, these tasks can be performed accurately. When searching for the context of citations, variant forms of citation identifiers, such as listing all authors or only the first author, or varying use of initials between the references section and the main text, can be handled using regular expressions.

The present invention provides an autonomous citation indexing system which indexes literature made available in electronic format, such as Postscript files, on the World Wide Web. Papers, journals, authors and so forth are ranked by the number of citations. The invention extends current capabilities by allowing interactive browsing of the literature. That is, given a particular paper of interest, it is possible to display the context of how the paper is cited in subsequent publications. The context may contain a brief summary of the paper, another author's response to the paper, or a subsequent work which builds upon the original article. Papers may be located by keyword search or by citation links. Papers related to a given paper can be located using common citation information or word vector similarity.

The concept underlying the present invention is generally that given a set of broad topic keywords, use web search engines and heuristics to locate and download papers which are potentially relevant to the given topic. The downloaded papers are parsed to extract semantic features, including citations, citation context, and word frequency information. Citations to identical papers are identified. This information is stored in a database which can be searched by keyword, or browsed by following citation links. It is also possible to find papers similar to a paper of interest by using common citation information or word vector similarity.

A principal object of the present invention is therefore the provision of a computer implemented citation indexing system which extracts citations from articles and identifies syntactic variants of citations to the same work.

Another object of the present invention is the provision of a computer implemented citation indexing system which extracts citations from articles and extracts the context of the citation in the work.

A further object of the present invention is the provision of a computer implemented citation indexing system which combines the use of automatic citation indexing and keyword indexing.

Further and still other objects of the invention will be more clearly understood when the following description is read in conjunction with the accompanying drawing.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 is a schematic block diagram of a preferred embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 2 is a response to a particular keyword search query;

FIG. 3 is a response to another particular keyword search query;

FIG. 4 is a response to a further particular keyword search query;

FIG. 5 shows an example of detailed document information for an item in the response in FIG. 4;

FIG. 6 is a list of papers citing a given article in FIG. 2 along with the context of the citations;

FIG. 7 is a listing of papers similar to that in FIG. 6 but for a different query;

FIG. 8 is a graphical illustration of the results of using different citation grouping algorithms;

FIG. 9 is a graphical illustration of results of using different citation grouping algorithms; and

FIG. 10 shows an example of document retrieval using the CCIDF measure for an article in a small database.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

Referring now to the figures and to FIG. 1 in particular, there is shown a schematic block diagram of a preferred embodiment of the present invention.

The autonomous citation indexing system 10 comprises three main components: (i) a “crawler” module 12 for the automatic location and acquisition of publications, (ii) a document parsing and database creation module 14, and (iii) a query processing module 16 which supports search by keyword and browsing by citation links through a web browser interface 18 to the world wide web.

Appendix A contains algorithms used in various components of the system. Currently, the only document formats supported are Postscript and PDF (Portable Document Format) because most research publications on the web are currently in Postscript or PDF form. Other formats could be used, e.g. scanned bitmap formats, with appropriate converters, the construction of which is known to those skilled in the art.

The invention is described primarily with reference to scientific publications. However, the invention is equally applicable to the searching of publications in any field, such as legal articles.

The algorithm and the system comprising the present invention may be sometimes hereafter referred to as “CiteSeer”.

While reference is made herein to searching the web, the invention is applicable to searching any literature in electronic form and where literature is in non-electronic form, conversion to electronic form by use of optical character recognition (OCR) for example, is possible.

Document Acquisition and Database Initialization

CiteSeer can be used to create comprehensive indexes of literature on the web, or to create indexes of a user-specified topic. When the user wishes to explore a new topic, a new instance of the agent is created for that particular topic. The first step is the initiation of a search for web pages which are likely to contain links to papers of interest. The user initiates a search by providing broad keywords to crawler module 12 using a web browser interface 18. CiteSeer correctly formats queries for several widely used search engines, such as AltaVista, HotBot, and Excite, and uses heuristics to locate papers, e.g. searching for pages which also contain the words “publications”, “papers”, “postscript”. A crawling robot, usenet newsgroups, or internet or intranet mailing lists may also be used for locating and downloading works from the web. CiteSeer locates and downloads Postscript or PDF files identified by “.ps”, “.ps.Z”, “.pdf”, “pdf.Z”, “pdf.gz” or “.ps.gz” extensions. Duplicate URLs (Universal Resource Locator) and Postscript files are avoided. While the preferred embodiment of the invention searches Postscript or PDF files, other document formats may also be searched.

When a new CiteSeer agent is created, a new database is created in order to store parsed document information. The database contains the following information: text from the document, the URL of the document, word frequency information for the text of the documents and citations, the text and context of citations, parsed subfield information, and the syntax of queries that are made to the database.

Document Parsing

Document parsing is the processing of downloaded documents to extract semantic features. A CiteSeer agent invokes document parsing module 14 which controls this process by invoking various parsing programs, and performing organizational housekeeping, error log generation, and hardware usage management. The parsing programs extract the desired document features and place them into a database 20. The parsing process can occur simultaneously with the document downloading process.

As documents are searched for by the crawler module 12, the document parsing module 14 watches the download directory and begins the parsing process on documents as they become available. Upon invocation, arguments to the parsing module specify which machines and how many CPUs on each machine may be simultaneously used to parse documents. This allows for many documents to be processed in parallel if the hardware is available. A system of semaphores insures against overload and underload on the specified machines. Before documents are processed, they are moved to a “working” directory, and after the parsing is attempted, they are moved to a “notprocessed” directory upon failure or an “archive” directory upon success. The parsing module also records the results of all processing in log files, including the reason for complete or partial parsing failures.

The first step in document parsing is the conversion of the Postscript file into text in text extractor 22. We currently use the pstotext program from the DEC Virtual Paper Project (http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/virtualpaper/home.html). The text of documents is stored in document text database 24.

Once the formatted ASCII text has been extracted from the Postscript file for a particular document, a few checks are made to verify that the document is a valid research document. These checks include heuristics used to check for the existence of a list of references near the end of the document and a check for non-English documents. Presently, publications in other languages are not processed but such a capability can be added. An attempt is also made to correct the page order of documents which are identified as having reverse page order. Invalid documents are recorded as such and skipped.

Documents identified as valid are then parsed to identify document body features. Heuristics are used to identify the following:

Header: The information at the beginning of the paper that contains the title, author, institution, and other information that comes before the main document text.

Abstract: If it exists, the abstract text is extracted.

Introduction: If it exists, the first 300 words of the introduction section are extracted.

Citations: The list of references made by the document are extracted and parsed further as described below.

Word Frequency: Word frequencies are recorded for all words in the document except those in the citations. The recorded words are stemmed using Porter's algorithm to combine different forms of the same word. The word frequencies are used later in the calculation of word weight vectors where the distance between vectors will be used as a semantic distance measure.

The heuristics used to parse the document body are relatively straightforward. The first (case sensitive) occurrence of the word “Abstract” or “ABSTRACT” is used to identify the beginning of the abstract, while the first occurrence of “Introduction” or “INTRODUCTION” is used to identify the beginning of the introduction, unless these words came too late in the document. Anything before the abstract (or introduction if no abstract) is considered to be the header.

Once the set of references has been identified, individual citations are extracted. Each citation is parsed using heuristics to extract the following fields: title, author, year of publication, page numbers, and citation identifier. The citation identifier is the information in the citation that is used to cite that article in the body of the document (e.g. “[6]”, “[Giles97]”, “[Marr 1982”]). Word frequencies for each citation are also recorded, with stop word removal and stemming applied the same as in the document word frequency extraction. The citation identifiers are used to find the locations in the document body where the citations are actually made. This allows extraction of the context of the citations.

The heuristics used to parse citations were constructed using an “invariants first” philosophy. That is, subfields of a citation which have relatively uniform syntactic indicators as to their position and composition given all previous parsing, are always parsed next. For example, the label of a citation to mark it in context always exists at the beginning of a citation and the format is uniform across all citations. Also the year of publication exists in almost every citation as a four digit number beginning with the digits “19”. Once the more regular features of a citation are identified, trends in syntactic relationships between subfields to be identified and those already identified are used to guess where the desired subfield exists (if at all). For example, author information almost always precedes title information, and publisher information almost always is after the title. This method can be extended by adding the concept of enumerated lists. For example, a list of the canonical form of each publication could be created and the various forms in which the name of the publication appears would map to this canonical form. This canonical form would then be the form stored in the actual CiteSeer database. Citation parsing can also be extended using learning techniques and known bibliographic information.

Formal measurement of the citation parsing statistics has not been performed, however use of the database suggests that performance is adequate for useful browsing and search of documents. The heuristics were designed to be conservative, that is, to identify and reject citations which do not properly fit the manually constructed models rather than try to make a “best guess”. Table 1 shows some parsing statistics for two example CiteSeer databases. One was constructed using the broad key words “neural networks” and the other “information retrieval”. Note that no attempt was made to exhaustively index all papers found on the web in these areas. Limited size databases are used for efficiency during testing. The results show that the titles and authors can be found in citations roughly 80 percent of the time and page numbers roughly 40 percent of the time. The low number for page numbers detected is probably due (at least partially) to the fact that many citations did not contain page numbers. The year was always found in the citations because the heuristics currently reject any string evaluated as a potential citation in which a year could not be found.

TABLE 1 Database Neural networks Information retrieval Documents parsed 5093 2331 Citations found in documents 89614 40007 Titles identified 71908/89614 = 31346/40007 = 80.2% 78.4% Authors identified 73539/89614 = 32154/40007 = 82.1% 80.4% Page numbers identified 39595/89614 = 15681/40007 = 44.2% 39.2% Years identified 89614/89614 = 40007/40007 = 100.0% 100.0%

An Autonomous Citation Indexing (ACI) system also benefits from the ability to identify the bibliographic details of the papers which are indexed. Without this ability, it is not possible to properly analyze the graph formed by citation links. For specific publication venues, it should be possible to take advantage of the regularity across individual articles in order to autonomously extract items such as the title, authors, etc. However, for papers which are autonomously located on the web, on a researcher's homepage for example, the problem is more difficult. We have investigated the problem of determining author and title information from Postscript or PDF files that have been autonomously found on the web. By analyzing the font information, it is relatively easy to extract the title. Accurately identifying the authors is somewhat harder, however it is relatively simple to detect the header of an article, and thus to detect self-citation. Our prototype ACI system currently marks a citation as a self-citation if one of the author's names is located in the header of the indexed article. There are avenues for accurately extracting author names from arbitrary articles. For example, recognizing and parsing the various forms of article headers, creating databases of author names, cross-correlating with bibliographic records, or learning techniques may enable accurate author identification for arbitrary articles. Note that for articles which are found on the web, it may be difficult to determine author affiliations, publication venue, etc. accurately. However, an ACI system can link to the original Web page where the article was located, which typically contains that information.

Database Browsing

The third component of CiteSeer is database browsing using the query processing module 16, which is accessed via a web browser interface 18. Because the database supports concurrent access, browsing is available as soon as the first document is parsed and placed in the document text database 24. The query processing module 16 provides several different browsing capabilities that allow a user to navigate through the document text database 24. Although search by keyword is supported, there is emphasis on using the links between “citing” and “cited” documents to find related research papers. The following is a description of keyword search and browsing by citation links.

The first query to CiteSeer is a keyword search, which returns a list of articles matching the query. The literature can then be browsed by following the links between the articles made by citations. Suppose, for example, the user would like to find all cited papers authored jointly by Giles and Chen in the “neural networks” database mentioned above. The example query, citation: +Giles +Chen asks for all citations which contains the words “Giles” and “Chen”. FIG. 2 shows the results of this query. FIG. 3 shows the results of the query dempster. The articles have been ranked by the number of citations to the articles.

The number of documents which cite each reference is given before the reference. CiteSeer can identify the same citation even if it exists in several different formats using an Identical Citation Grouping (ICG) algorithm described below.

The first part of the results from an example keyword search in the documents themselves, document: +recurrent +series, is shown in FIG. 4. Here the header information is given for documents which contain the keyword in their body. Details of a particular document can be found by choosing the link (Details). The first part of the details for the second item in FIG. 4 is shown in FIG. 5. The header, abstract, URL, and list of references made by this document can be seen.

Once an initial keyword search is made, the user can browse the database using citation links. The user can find which papers are cited by a particular publication and which papers cite a particular publication, including the context of those citations. Referring in FIG. 2 to the example of papers authored by Giles and Chen. Suppose the user wishes to know which papers cite the article “Extracting and learning an unknown grammar with recurrent neural networks” shown as the third item in FIG. 2. Choosing the link (Details) returns a list of papers citing the given article along with the context of the citations, as shown in FIG. 6. FIG. 7 shows a similar listing for the context of citations to the first paper from the dempster query. The (Details) links provide details of the citing documents, similar to FIG. 5.

As mentioned in the references to previous work, semantic distance measures between bodies of text are used to measure their “relatedness”. Semantic distance measures have been implemented in two applications in CiteSeer: the identification of citations to identical documents and the identification of documents related to a given document.

Citations to a given article can be made in significantly different ways. For example, the following citations, extracted from neural network publications, are all to the same article:

[7] L. Breiman, J. H. Friedman, R. A. Olshen, and C. J. Stone. Classification and Regression Trees. Wadsworth, Pacific Grove, Calif., 1984.

6. L. Breiman, J. Friedman, R. Olshen, and C. Stone. Classification and Regression Trees, Wadsworth, Pacific Grove, 1984.

[1] L. Breiman et al. Classification and Regression Trees. Wadsworth, 1984.

Much of the significance of CiteSeer derives from the ability to recognize that all of these citations refer to the same article. This ability allows (1) a detailed listing of a cited article to show all instances of the citations across multiple articles (as in FIGS. 6 and 7), (2) statistics on citation frequency to be generated, allowing the estimation of the importance of articles, and (3) more accurate identification of sub-fields for a citation, e.g. errors or incomplete fields in one instance of a citation may be resolved from analysis of the group of citations to the same article. More accurate identification of sub-fields for a citation leads to more accurate estimation of statistics based on fields, e.g. the citation frequency for authors.

As suggested by the example citations above, the problem is not completely trivial. We have investigated four methods of identifying citations to identical articles, along with a simple baseline method for comparison.

Normalizing certain aspects of citations tends to improve the results of the following methods. We have used the following normalizations:

Conversion to lowercase.

Removal of hyphens.

Removal of citation identifiers, e.g. [3], [Giles92] at the beginning of the citation.

Expansion of common abbreviations, e.g. conf.→conference, proc.→proceedings.

Common abbreviations for the following words are currently expanded: conference, proceedings, international, society, transactions, and technical report.

Removal of extraneous words and characters which may occur in some, but usually not all, instances of a citation. The following words are removed: pp., pages, in press, accepted for publication, vol., volume, no., number, et. al, isbn. The following characters are removed—&:( )[ ].

The following baseline method was used for comparison with the methods described below:

For each citation a If this citation has not been grouped yet Create a new group with this citation For each remaining ungrouped citation b Add citation b to the current group if the number of matching . . . words is greater than x% of the length of the . . . shorter citation End for End if End for

The LikeIt algorithm is an intelligent string comparison algorithm introduced by Yianilos supra. LikeIt is used in the following way:

Sort the citations by length, from the longest to the shortest citation

For each citation c

Find the group g with the highest value d=LikeIt(c,c)/LikeIt(c,)

If d is greater than a threshold then add c to the group g

Else create a new group for this citation

End if

End for

Order the groups such that each successive group has the most number of words in . . . common with the previous group out of all following groups

The final ordering step allows easier identification of errors in the resulting grouping.

The initial sorting step means that the most complete form of each citation is usually encountered first.

The following algorithm is proposed for finding identical citations, which is based on word matching.

Sort the citations by length, from the longest to the shortest citation

For each citation c

Find the group g with the highest number of matching words

If the ratio of the number of non-matching words to the number of matching . . . words in c is less than a threshold then add c to the group g

Else create a new group for this citation

End if

End for

Order the groups such that each successive group has the most number of words in . . . common with the previous group out of all following groups

The current implementation of the algorithm is:

Sort the citations by length, from the longest to the shortest citation

For each citation c

For each word in the citation

Find the array of groups containing this word from the words hash table

End for

Find the most common group g in the arrays of groups for each word

If the ratio of the number of non-matching words to the number of matching . . . words in c is less than a threshold then add c to the group g

Else create a new group for this citation by adding the new group number to . . . the array of groups containing this word, which is contained in a words . . . hash table

End if

End for

Order the groups such that each successive group has the most number of words in . . . common with the previous group out of all following groups.

We propose the following algorithm for finding identical citations, which is similar to the previous algorithm, with the addition of phrase information.

Sort the citations by length, from the longest to the shortest citation

For each citation c

Find the group g with the highest number of matching words

Let a=the ratio of the number of non-matching words to the number of . . . matching words

Let b=the ratio of the number of non-matching phrases to the number of . . . matching phrases where a phrase is every set of two successive words in . . . every section of the citation containing three or more words (sections . . . are delimited by., or the beginning/end of the citation)

If (a<threshold1) or (a<threshold 2 and b<threshold 3)

Then then add c to the group g

Else create a new group for this citation

End for

Order the groups such that each successive group has the most number of words in . . . common with the previous group out of all following groups

Our current implementation is similar to the previous algorithm (based on a hash table or arrays).

Automatically extracting subfields from citations is difficult. For example, commas can be used to separate fields, but are also used to separate lists of authors, and can be embedded in titles. Full stops can be used to separate subfields or for abbreviations. Sometimes there is no punctuation between fields. The subfield algorithm we have investigated focuses on the title and author subfields, and depends mainly on accurate extraction of the title. Heuristics are used to extract the title, where the main heuristic is “the title is the first subfield containing three or more words”, and a number of URLs account for common exceptions. Citations are grouped together if the title and principle author match. Normalization is used, for example to make the algorithm insensitive to the use of dashes and spaces. Multiple hypotheses are used for extracting the principle author. The algorithm is insensitive to whether one or all authors are listed, or whether author first names are used.

We performed quantitative tests in order to evaluate the performance of the various algorithms described above. We downloaded 1,947 AI papers in Postscript form from the web (many more are available) and converted the files to text. We extracted 39,166 citations from these papers, from which we further extracted four subsets, corresponding to citations that contained the words “reinforcement”, “constraint”, “face”, and “reasoning”. These sets contained 406, 295, 349, and 514 citations respectively. We manually grouped the citations in each set in order to establish the correct grouping, with the aid of an approximate grouping from one of the algorithms. We used ordering of the groups according to similarity and analysis of the errors made by the algorithms in order to catch errors in the manually constructed correct groupings.

The set of citations containing the word “reinforcement” was used to tune the parameters in the algorithms (the thresholds on the comparison tests), and the remaining three sets were used for testing. For each algorithm, we compared the automated grouping with the correct grouping, in order to create an error score. The errors that we present here are the percentage of the correct groups for which an error exists in the automated grouping. We also calculated the percentage of insertions and deletions from groups which was helpful in the tuning stage. Tables 2 and 3 show the results with and without normalization respectively, and Table 4 shows the running time of the various algorithms. FIG. 8 shows the average results for the various algorithms, and FIG. 9 shows the running time for the various algorithms.

When using normalization, the average percentage of correct groups that were not 100 percent correct in the automated grouping were, from best to worst: Word and Phrase Matching 5.3%, Word Matching 7%, Baseline Simple 10.3%, Subfield 12.3%, LikeIt 14.3%. Note that an error of 10 percent for example, does not imply that 10 percent of citations are not grouped correctly, e.g. the addition of one incorrect citation to a group marks the entire group as incorrect. Without normalization, the results of all algorithms are worse, except for LikeIt, for which the normalization degrades performance (note that LikeIt does some of the same normalization internally, e.g. LikeIt ignores case by default), and the subfield algorithm which produces the same performance. The average error for LikeIt improved to 11% without normalization. The subfield algorithm results in significantly worse error than the best algorithm, but is significantly more efficient (the complexity is O(n) where n is the number of citations). Of the remaining algorithms, the running time shows significant advantages and favorable scaling properties for the Word Matching and Word and Phrase Matching algorithms, compared to the Baseline Simple and LikeIt algorithms. The scaling of the Word Matching and the Word and Phrase Matching algorithms depends on the co-occurrence of words between citations. It is possible to further speed up these algorithms by partitioning the citations, e.g. according to year (this reduces performance slightly because citations can contain an incorrect year). The algorithms (apart from the core of LikeIt) are currently implemented in Perl, and as such we expect they could be significantly faster if implemented in C++, for example.

The poor accuracy of the edit distance algorithm is of note. One factor that appears important from analysis of the errors that are made by the LikeIt algorithm is that two citations to the same article can be of significantly different lengths—LikeIt does not currently support a containment operation (“is a contained in b?” rather than “is a equal to b?”) although there are plans to add such an operation. Alternatively, string distances may not be a good paradigm for determining the semantic similarity of citations, or we may not be using the LikeIt distance in the best manner. LikeIt considers citation strings at the level of letters instead of words, and the order of letters (and thus words). Both of these factors contribute to string differences that may not correspond to semantic differences. Regarding the speed of LikeIt, we note that the interface from Perl to C introduces some delay, and that LikeIt is much faster when comparing a single query against a large database.

TABLE 2 Constraint Face Reasoning Average Number of Citations 295 349 514 Baseline Sample 12% 6% 13% 10.3% Word Matching  9% 4%  8%   7% Word and Phrase Matching  6% 3%  7%  5.3% LikeIt Algorithm 13% 13%  17% 14.3% Subfield 12% 9% 16% 12.3%

TABLE 3 Constraint Face Reasoning Average Number of Citations 295 349 514 Baseline Sample 16% 12% 19% 15.7% Word Matching 16% 11% 20% 15.7% Word and Phrase Matching 14%  9% 17% 13.3% LikeIt Algorithm  9% 10% 14%   11% Subfield 12%  9% 16% 12.3%

TABLE 4 Constraint Face Reasoning Number of Citations 295 349 514 Baseline Sample 16 23 41 Word Matching 3 4 8 Word and Phrase Matching 4 5 9 LikeIt Algorithm 61 76 141 Subfield 0.05 0.06 0.08

The following methods may be used to achieve improvements to the above algorithms: refinement of the normalization algorithm using quantitative tests, weighting of terms, e.g. according to the inverse collection frequency, and/or using semantic information, e.g. author, year, title, when this information is available from the heuristic parser.

While these algorithms are sufficient for practical use of the citation index, there are many avenues for improvement. For example, learning techniques can be used in order to more accurately parse the subfields of a citation. Large quantities of bibliographic information is freely available on the Web, and this information provides labeled training data that learning techniques can use in order to associate the words and/or the structure of citations with the corresponding subfields. More accurate subfield detection can then be used in order to further improve the accuracy of grouping identical citations.

Given a database of documents, a user may find a document of interest and then want to find other, related documents. This may be done manually by using semantic features such as author, research group, or publication venue for the document. However, CiteSeer also has a mechanism for the automatic retrieval of related documents based on distance measures of semantic features extracted from the documents.

In the prior art, web assistant agents used word frequency information to automatically measure how related two documents are. The philosophy behind this measure is that words that are generally uncommon, but are shared by two documents, give evidence that the two documents discuss similar concepts. While this is useful in some domains, in general it may have limitations which results in inadequate results. One major limitation is the inherent noise in this approach. Uncommon words may be shared by documents by coincidence, thereby giving false evidence that the documents are related. Another limitation of this approach is the ambiguity of words and phrases. For example “arm” could mean a human limb or a weapon. Simple word frequencies do not differentiate these uses, requiring context analysis for separation.

In the present invention several methods are for measuring document similarity.

One very common way to measure document topic similarity is that of word vectors. The present invention implements a TFIDF (Salton and Yang, supra) scheme to measure a value of each word stem in each document where a vector of all of the word stem values represent the “location” of a document in a word vector space. The projection of the word vector of one document on another document (dot product of the vectors) is the distance measure used. Currently, CiteSeer uses only the top few (typically 20) components of each document for computational reasons, however there is evidence that this truncation may not have a large affect on the distance measures (Salton and Buckley, supra).

A string edit distance measure can also be used to determine document similarity. Currently, CiteSeer uses the LikeIt string distance to measure the edit distance between the headers of documents in a database. The header of a document is simply all of the text in a document before the abstract (or the introduction if there is no abstract). The header tends to contain items such as the document title, author name and affiliation, and possibly the publication venue. LikeIt tries to match substrings in a larger string—common authors, institutions, or words in the title which tend to reduce the LikeIt distance between headers. The premise behind the use of LikeIt is that the document header contains important information about the document, and words in similar arrangements indicate documents of similar origin.

Single words (and even phrases to a lesser degree) may not have much power to represent the topic of or concepts discussed in a research paper. Citations of other works on the other hand, are hand picked by the authors as being related documents. It seems intuitive then to use citation information to judge the relatedness of documents. CiteSeer uses common citations to make an estimate of which documents in the downloaded database of research papers are the most closely related to a document picked by the user. This measure, “Common Citation Times Inverse Document Frequency” (CCIDF) is analogous to the word oriented TFIDF (Salton and Buckley, supra) word weights. The algorithm to calculate the CCIDF relatedness of all documents in the database to a document of interest A and choose the best M documents is as follows:

1. Use the Identical Citation Grouping (ICG) algorithm on the entire database of documents to get a count (c_(i)) of how frequently each cited paper i occurs in the database. Take the inverse of these frequencies as a weight for that citation $\left( {w_{i} = \frac{1}{c_{i}}} \right).$

This step only needs to be executed once when the database is created.

2. Determine the list of citations and their associated weights for document A and query the database to find the set of n documents [B_(j)]: j=1 . . . n which share at least one citation with document A.

3. For each j=1 . . . n, determine the relatedness of the document R_(j) as the sum of the weights of the citations shared with document A. $\begin{matrix} {R_{j} = {\sum\limits_{{{{i\varepsilon}\quad A}\bigcap i} \in \quad B_{j}}w_{i}}} & (2) \end{matrix}$

4. Sort the R_(j) values and return the documents B_(j) with the M highest R_(j) values.

As in the use of TFIDF, CCIDF assumes that if a very common citation is shared by two documents, this should be weighted more highly than a citation made by a large number of documents. Although we have not formally measured the performance of CCIDF, we have found it to be useful, and to perform better than the word vector or LikeIt based automatic similar document retrievers. FIG. 10 shows an example of similar document retrieval using the CCIDF measure in a small database which contains papers related to video coding.

Although we have found that citation based similar document retrieval is subjectively better than word vector or LikeIt based retrieval, CiteSeer also combines different methods of document similarity to result in a final similarity distance measure that may be more accurate than any single method alone. A weighted sum of document similarity measures is used as a combined similarity measure in the following algorithm:

1. Calculate the word vector, LikeIt, and citation similarity measures and normalize each measure to a 0 to 1 scale where 1 represents semantically identical documents, and 0 represents completely different documents (infinite semantic distance). Label the normalized similarity measures between two documents A and B as WV(A,B), LI(A,B), and CI(A,B) respectively.

2. Given a target document A and a set of n candidate documents [B_(j)]: j=1 . . . n, measure the similarity between document A and all n of the B_(j) documents using the three measures from step 1.

3. Let w_(WV), w_(LI), W_(CI) be the weights given to their respective similarity measures. These weight values are between 0 and 1 and they are always normalized so that w_(WV)+w_(LI)+w_(CI)=1.

4. Find a combined similarity measure S_(j) between document A and each of the B_(j) documents as the weighted sum:

S _(j) =w _(WV) WV(A,B)+w _(LI) LI(A,B)+w _(CI) CI(A,B)  (3)

5. Retrieve the documents with the highest S_(j) values.

Currently, the weights are manually adjusted to the fixed values WV(A,B)=0.25, LI(A,B)=0.25, and CI(A,B)=0.50. It should be possible to incorporate the use of learning techniques to automatically determine the best weights.

The combination based, similar document recommendation mechanism for CiteSeer has been implemented. Given a specific target document, the user chooses (Find Similar Articles) as seen in FIG. 4. The details of typically the ten best documents are returned for display in the web browser.

In summary, CiteSeer is an autonomous citation indexing system which autonomously creates a citation index. An ACI system autonomously extracts citations, identifies identical citations which occur in different formats, and identifies the context of citations in the body of articles. As with traditional citation indexes, ACI allows literature search using citation links, and the ranking of papers, journals, authors, etc. by the number of citations. In comparison with traditional citation indexing systems like SCI, ACI has both disadvantages and advantages. The disadvantages include the limited availability of literature in electronic format, and the possibility of lower accuracy (both of which are expected to become less of a disadvantage over time). However, the advantages are significant and include: a) no manual effort required for indexing, along with a corresponding reduction in cost and increase in availability, b) more up-to-date databases which can avoid lengthy journal publication delays, c) the potential for broader coverage of the literature as opposed to indexing only a select set of journals, and d) the facilitation of literature search based on the context of citations—given a particular paper of interest, an ACI system can display the context of how the paper is cited in subsequent publications. The context of citations can be very useful for literature search and evaluation. Overall, ACI can improve scientific communication, and facilitates an increased rate of scientific dissemination and feedback.

More specifically CiteSeer can be used as an assistant agent that automates and enhances the task of finding interesting and relevant publications on the web, CiteSeer is different from previous citation indexing systems in that the indexing process is completely automatic. CiteSeer autonomously locates, parses, and indexes articles found on the World Wide Web. The advantages CiteSeer provides are that of timeliness and automation. The system indexes preprints and technical reports, as well as journal and conference articles. The publication delay for journals and conferences means that CiteSeer has access to more recent articles. This allows research effort to progress more rapidly, and reduces the possibility of performing work which has already been done by others. The system is completely automatic, and does not require human effort in the indexing process.

Some of the most important capabilities of CiteSeer are:

1. The ability to parse citations from papers and identify citations to identical papers that may differ in syntax. This allows the generation of citation statistics and the grouping of work which cites a given paper.

2. The ability to extract and show the context of citations to a given paper, allowing a researcher to see what other authors have to say about a given paper.

3. The ability to find related articles based on common citations and on word vector or string distance similarity.

While there has been described and illustrated a preferred autonomous citation indexing and literature browser, it will be apparent to those skilled in the art that variations and modifications are possible without deviating from the spirit and broad teachings of the present invention which shall be limited solely by the scope of the claims appended hereto. 

What is claimed is:
 1. A computer-implemented citation indexing system comprising: means for locating and acquiring publications in electronic format; a document parser for extracting semantic features, including citations, from acquired publications; and means for autonomously identifying variant forms of citations to the same publication, where said means for autonomously identifying variant forms of citations to the same publication normalizes citations, sorts citations by length and processes citations in order beginning with the longest length citation, computes distance measures to all previously identified groups of citations for each citation, and either adds the citation to an existing group or creates a new group, where said distance measure comprises word matching.
 2. A computer-implemented citation indexing system as set forth in claim 1, where said means for autonomously identifying variant forms of citations to the same publication normalizes citations, sorts citations by length and processes citations in order beginning with the longest length citation, computes distance measures to all previously identified groups of citations for each citation, and either adds the citation to an existing group or creates a new group, where said distance measure comprises word and phrase matching.
 3. A computer-implemented citation indexing system as set forth in claim 1, where said means for autonomously identifying variant forms of citations to the same publication normalizes citations, sorts citations by length and processes citations in order beginning with the longest length citation, computes distance measures to all previously identified groups of citations for each citation, and either adds the citation to an existing group or creates a new group, where said distance measure comprises word matching and where said publications in electronic format are publications on the world wide web.
 4. A computer-implemented citation indexing system as set forth in claim 2, where said means for autonomously identifying variant forms of citations to the same publication normalizes citations, sorts citations by length and processes citations in order beginning with the longest length citation, computes distance measures to all previously identified groups of citations for each citation, and either adds the citation to an existing group or creates a new group, where said distance measure comprises word and phrase matching and where said publications in electronic format are publications on the world wide web.
 5. A method of computer-implemented citation indexing for identifying different forms of citations to the same publication comprising the steps of: searching for desired publications in electronic format; locating and acquiring the desired publications; parsing the acquired publications for extracting and storing semantic features, including citations, from the acquired publications; and autonomously identifying variant forms of citations to the same publication, said autonomously identifying variant forms of citations to the same publication comprising normalizing citations, sorting citations by length and processing citations in order beginning with the longest length citation, computing for each citation, distance measures to all previously identified groups of citations, and either adding the citation to an existing group or creating a new group, where said computing distance measures comprises word matching.
 6. A method of computer-implemented citation indexing as set forth in claim 5, said autonomously identifying variant forms of citations to the same publication comprising normalizing citations, sorting citations by length and processing citations in order beginning with the longest length, computing for each citation, distance measures to all previously identified groups of citations, and either adding the citation to an existing group or creating a new group, where said computing distance measures comprises word and phrase matching.
 7. A method of computer-implemented citation indexing as set forth in claim 5, said autonomously identifying variant forms of citations to the same publication comprising normalizing citations, sorting citations by length and processing citations in order beginning with the longest length citation, computing for each citation, distance measures to all previously identified groups of citations, and either adding the citation to an existing group or creating a new group, where said computing distance measures comprises word matching and where said publications in electronic format are publications on the world wide web.
 8. A method of computer-implemented citation indexing as set forth in claim 5, said autonomously identifying variant forms of citations to the same publication comprising normalizing citations, sorting citations by length and processing citations in order beginning with the longest length, computing for each citation, distance measures to all previously identified groups of citations, and either adding the citation to an existing group or creating a new group, where said computing distance measures comprises word and phrase matching and where said publications in electronic format are publications on the world wide web. 